Have Your Say

Let’s Be Honest About The Crown
Let’s be honest about this whole Crown thing, because the way it’s talked about in modern New Zealand borders on nonsense.
Every time we hear the phrase rolled out by politicians, activists, or commentators, it’s framed as if some 19th-century British empire is still sitting across the table, quill pen in hand, negotiating with iwi.
But that isn’t reality.
The Crown today is not Britain.
It is not Queen Victoria.
It is not a king of England.
It is not a colonial administration.
The Crown today is the New Zealand Government.
And the New Zealand Government is funded by one group and one group only: modern New Zealand taxpayers.
That means Māori, Pākehā, Asian, Pasifika, migrants, refugees, and families who arrived here generations after the Treaty was signed.
Most people paying tax in this country today have absolutely no ancestral connection to the original Crown that entered into the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Yet they are constantly spoken about as if they do.
That disconnect matters, because language shapes perception.
When people are told, over and over again, that issues are strictly “between the Crown and Māori”, it creates the illusion that responsibility rests with some distant historical actor rather than with the government we elect and the taxpayers who fund it.
And that’s where frustration starts to build.
New Zealand has already gone a long way down the road of historical Treaty settlements. Billions of dollars in financial redress, land transfers, cultural recognition, and formal apologies have been negotiated through legal processes designed to address specific historical grievances.
These settlements were intended to be exactly that, settlements.
A resolution of defined historical claims, a line drawn under past wrongs so the country could move forward together, not a permanent reopening of governance itself.
But over time, that clarity has been lost.
Instead of a clean distinction between historical redress and modern policy, everything has been blended together under the same banner.
Treaty language is now routinely used to justify ongoing, race-based government programmes that sit inside everyday budgets.
Education, housing, health, governance, advisory bodies, funding streams, all increasingly framed through ethnicity rather than need.
Supporters will argue this is about equity rather than equality.
They’ll say unequal treatment is necessary to achieve equal outcomes.
But when those distinctions become permanent, inherited, and embedded across the entire public system, they stop being corrective and start becoming divisive.
For many ordinary New Zealanders, this feels less like reconciliation and more like an open-ended invoice.
They are told they must pay, but not question.
Fund, but not benefit.
Accept, but not debate.
And if they do raise concerns, they’re accused of not understanding history, acting in bad faith, or being something worse entirely.
That is not how you build social cohesion.
The reality is simple, even if it’s uncomfortable.
When money is taken from everyone, but programmes are not available to everyone, people will feel excluded.
When the country is repeatedly told it consists of two permanent groups with different rules and different pathways, division is inevitable. No amount of moral lecturing changes that.
What makes it worse is the continued reliance on the phrase “Crown versus Māori” as a shield against scrutiny.
It’s used as if it automatically excuses modern policy choices, as if invoking the Treaty ends the conversation before it even begins.
But we are no longer living in 1840.
We are living in a diverse, modern country where millions of people share the tax burden, the infrastructure, the laws, and the future.
A country where fairness must be seen to be fair, not just argued to be fair by those in power.
None of this means ignoring history.
Cultural recognition matters.
Identity matters.
Language, heritage, and tikanga have a place in a shared national story.
But culture should not become a gatekeeper for access to public resources, and ancestry should not determine your relationship with the state.
If the goal is genuinely better outcomes for people who are struggling, then policy should be built around need, deprivation, and measurable results.
Poor kids are poor kids, regardless of ancestry. Families in housing stress don’t suddenly have different needs because of ethnicity.
Poverty doesn’t check your iwi card, and neither should public policy create permanent privilege.
Health outcomes improve when systems work for everyone who needs them.
Historical wrongs deserved acknowledgment and redress.
That process matters.
But it should not become a permanent framework for separating citizens into categories that determine access to opportunity and public money.
If we keep telling ourselves that everything is still “between the Crown and Māori”, we lock the country into a story that no longer matches reality.
We pretend that modern taxpayers are stand-ins for colonial actors, and we excuse present-day political choices by wrapping them in historical language.
That doesn’t move us forward.
If we want unity, honesty has to come first.
Say what you mean.
If a policy is about the modern government making a modern choice, own it.
If spending is about addressing need, justify it transparently.
If outcomes matter, measure them openly.
New Zealand will never move forward by pretending we are still negotiating a past that no longer exists.
We move forward by treating people as equal citizens in the present.
That’s not radical. It’s just honest.
Chur.

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=26555346720735446&set=a.263771000319710

Matt Doocey MP   · Follow
My Letter to the editor in The Christchurch Press this morning.
I was appalled to pick up the Press on Tuesday morning to see they had dedicated half of the front page to announce the re-selection of a Green MP. Reading the article (another half page on the second page of the paper) I was even more surprised to see it framed as a story of her standing in that seat for the first time! A simple check of the ballot from 2023 would have clearly shown she stood for Christchurch Central and was defeated in the last election. Yet when National MPs are reselected for their seats we get crickets. One would have thought in an election year, where the media should take more care to be transparent and balanced in their reporting, the Press might have considered being slightly less overtly biased, not to mention factually correct?
Matt Doocey Waimakariri MP

n this interview from the WEF forum in Davos, the insipid vain and smug Helen Clark has only nasty things to say about Winston’s party. Without actually naming it, the ex New Zealand PM smears NZ First as a “maga style” party
Show more

https://x.com/2ETEKA/status/2015747595700990220?s=20&fbclid=IwY2xjawPpIghleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETE2TVVsQ3ZhTnliQWJNSzN4c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHlSvoxJDDh_IU-N5Y-ttw3OablaGx7e4Wr1EV7mXDZ6OkVcUfE7A3i8E9pbZ_aem_8rQ0D_H6e5qAScvcguuB8A